by Dean Koontz
Chris Roberts hopes that one of the three has had the wit to call for additional backup. Even if more Arcadians are en route, however, the odds are they won’t get here in time to stop these rednecks from doing something stupid.
Sally Jones, thus far the only spokesperson for the government in this matter, understands the need to appear equal to the threat of the crowd. She shouts at the restive mob for quiet. “Eight more of us inside the house, four in the stables,” she lies. “We came here in serious numbers because this damn well is an urgent matter of national security, whether you want to believe us or not. The future of our country is at stake. I know you’re all patriots here. I know you want to do the right thing. Think before you do something you’ll regret. Many of you probably have children at home. Think about them. You don’t want to do anything that leaves those kids without a family. They need you.”
“Is that a threat?” shouts a man in the mob. “You mean to shoot us down like we’re animals?”
Sally raises both hands in a gesture of placation. “No, no, no. I’m saying we’re engaged in legitimate law enforcement here. Anyone who interferes with us will have to be charged according to their offenses and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. There’s no way around that. To the full extent of the law. Your babies back home will be without you for a long time. Doing prison, you’ll stain yourself and them, your family name, their reputation. All for what? All because you’ve been misinformed.”
A man who previously identified himself as Linwood Haney, and who seems to be the leader of this rabble, speaks up. “Bring Chase and Alexis out here, them and their three girls, so we can ask ’em is all this righteous police work like you say.”
“We can’t do that,” Sally says. “You don’t understand. Chase and Alexis have agreed to cooperate with us in return for immunity. They’re in the middle of giving depositions, under oath. It would compromise the integrity of the deposition process to interrupt the continuity of the recording, and that would jeopardize Chase and Alexis’s immunity, which is the last thing they would want, believe me, the last thing.”
Chris winces at this response to Haney. Sally talks down to the crowd, as though she thinks their kind are as ignorant and clueless as the stereotypical hayseeds with which some in the media believe “flyover country” is entirely populated.
Sure enough, a woman shouts an objection. “You sayin’ their lawyer is in there with them at this ungodly hour? Hell’s bells, woman, their lawyer is Rolly Capshaw. Old Rolly goes to bed eight-thirty every night, sure as the flag has stars and stripes. He won’t stay up till three in the mornin’ like this even if he knows for a fact it’s the night Jesus is comin’ back.”
Among the crowd, there is considerable agreement with this assessment, and Linwood Haney says, “There won’t be a damn thing righteous about any deposition taken without they’re allowed a lawyer.”
21
THE CLATTER OF THE HELICOPTER is more muffled in the upstairs hallway than it had been in the attic. But as the deceitful little whore pretends that her fettered ankles require slow progress on the front stairs and as Janis prods her to move faster toward the foyer below, the rhythmic pounding of the blades grows louder again.
The sound echoes inside Janis’s skull, and a headache grows, and the shells of her ears burn as if abused by the clapping hands of her vicious sister, and though she’s standing up, she feels the weight of her long-ago tormentor on her chest.
In the foyer, she jerks the girl around to face her and is satisfied to see stark fear instead of arrogance. “You listen to me, you worthless little slut. Damn if I’m going to have my brain spun up in a control web because of you. I’d as soon kill you as spit on you, so the time for trickery is over. It’s over. I’m going to cut the zip-ties, and I’m taking you out there on the porch, and you’re gonna tell these stupid shitkickers you were wrong to call them. Tell them you didn’t understand what was really happening here. You’re going to give the performance of a lifetime, and don’t tell me you can’t, because I know your kind. You’re just like her. Deceit is woven through your bones. Your tongue is a filthy, licking lie machine. You can be as bratty as you want and get away with it because of what you do for your daddy, like what she did for ours, the sleazy little whore. I know the truth, I saw them that one time, and I know you. You’re going to stand close to me, lean against me, like you feel safe with me and I’m your best friend ever, stay close so no one can see I’m holding you by the back of your belt. You’re going to smile and charm and lie your ass off. You’re going to send these shitkickers home, or I swear I’ll draw my gun and shoot you in the head, right there on the porch, blow your rotten whore brains all over the damn porch.”
22
CHRIS ROBERTS DOESN’T REALIZE THAT Janis has come out of the house with the girl, Laurie, until the helicopter copilot sweeps the bright beam away from the line of agents and splashes light across the front veranda.
Disaster.
Whatever the hell Janis thinks she’s doing, it’s going to end in disaster.
Something’s wrong with her. She’s always ardent, intense, edgy, but this is not that Janis. This Janis is a human grenade with her pin half pulled. Her shoulders are drawn up, head turtled down. Her alluring body is shorn of curves, by tension shaped into the crossed staves of a scarecrow. Her eyes appear sprung in their sockets like those of some goggle-eyed jack-in-the-box. Her smile is a ghastly slash, and if her face contains any color, the searchlight bleaches it to the pallor of a corpse.
The child beside Janis stares out from among wild tangles of disarranged hair. She stands with hands fisted at her sides. Her posture is that of a shocked ledge walker who missteps and is supported for a microsecond by thin air, who stands in the splinter of an instant between the end of the ledge and the beginning of the plunge.
As one, every member of the crowd falls silent, and there is just the beating of the chopper’s blades, like the tolling of a lead bell.
Janis raises her voice. “Laurie Longrin wants to apologize.” She punctuates her announcement with a smile like a sickle.
23
FUDDA-FUDDA-FUDDA-FUDDA-FUDDA…
With her left hand, Janis Dern grips the little whore’s belt, preventing her from making a break for the crowd. The thumb of her other hand is hooked on her own belt, at her right side, so that in an instant she can push her sport coat out of the way and draw the pistol from her hip holster.
The searchlight shouldn’t be either hot or cold. It’s merely a light. But it makes the painted porch floor glisten like ice, and it chills Janis. It cuts at her eyes. She can’t look directly at it.
By the time she and the punk reach the porch steps and stop, the crowd of would-be rescuers falls silent. They stand expectant, some with their mouths open, their faces as dull as those of cattle. They are all as common as dirt, and Janis can never be one of them; never has been, never will be. She has known herself to be above the ruck and rabble since she was nine, since the day she saw Francine on her knees, submissive and servicing that bastard in the way that he preferred, both of them as base as barnyard animals. In that instant, she knows she is not of their blood. The story of their family is a lie. Surely she was born to parents unknown, a husband and wife of the highest station, and soon after birth was kidnapped, sold into this squalid household, for the use and amusement of base and cruel people. Shortly after seeing him with Francine, Janis is alone with their so-called father, and though he doesn’t come on to her, she tells him that if she is in line behind her sisters to do what Francine does for him, she will bite it off, bite off what she can and spit it out and bite off more. She doesn’t belong in that family. She doesn’t belong among these people here tonight, either, and she is too high-born ever to belong among the “adjusted people” who have in their heads a web of a thousand filaments with which their betters manipulate them through the puppet theater of their lives.
Now she smiles at the girl beside her and smiles at these upturned faces.
This duplicitous little bitch has the skill to deceive the finest lie detector. The brat better con these cretins and send them home to their beds, because if this crisis can’t be smoothed away, there is a brain implant with the name Janis Dern on it. Janis will not tolerate being injected, reduced to the condition of property. At thirty, she is perhaps too old and not sufficiently beautiful to be stocked in one of the Aspasias, but she will not allow herself to be made property of any kind, for any purpose.
Aspasia is the name of the mistress of some famous mayor of Athens 2,400 years ago, and it is what they call the palatial, highly secret, membership-only brothels in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and D.C. where the Techno Arcadians with the greatest wealth and power go to indulge their most extreme desires. Not common whorehouses. Mansions of exquisite architecture. Decorated with tens of millions of dollars’ worth of art, antiques, and furnishings. Palaces of style and refined taste that make it possible for the members of the club to tell themselves that their sickest and most degrading desires are in fact as elevated as the elegant environment. The girls are stunning, each one as beautiful as the most striking supermodels, each one a perfect daughter of Eros. Totally submissive. Ready to satisfy the most extreme desires.
There is no demand they will refuse. Charming, seeming to be happier than angels, they live in Aspasia and never leave, never even have a desire to leave, not one passing impulse to be free. The injections administered to them are different from those used to make “adjusted people.” This ultimate nanoimplant deletes every last one of the girl’s memories. Deletes her entire personality and installs a new and much simpler one. She becomes a living toy. The process cannot be reversed. Who she was is gone forever.
Janis has been in the Aspasia that is outside Washington, D.C.
Because she is judged to be a fervid revolutionary, beyond all doubt devoted to the cause, she was allowed to go there as a guest of a man who is a member.
The experience haunts her dreams and motivates her to rise in the hierarchy of Techno Arcadia until she is beyond any risk of being punished with injection.
Now she smiles again at the girl beside her and again at the upturned faces of the rescuers, who seem almost to be a different species from her own.
She says, “Laurie Longrin wants to apologize.”
The man who took her to the Washington Aspasia is a hugely successful entrepreneur, Gregory, with whom she conducts an intense on-again-off-again affair, which is one way that she ascends the Arcadian ladder. She had heard whispers of the brothels, rumors so vague they weren’t credible. Sex with Greg is vigorous, interesting, and…edgy. With sly amusement, he sometimes calls himself Jekyll and Hyde, but it turns out there is some truth in this. She had seen only Jekyll, and he wanted her to accompany Hyde to Aspasia, not to participate but only to watch. Among other things, Gregory is an exhibitionist. And he felt that it would be interesting if, when Janis is in the future bedded with Jekyll, she would have in her mind the threat of Hyde. That night at Aspasia, for more than four hours, Gregory indulged in a demonic catalogue of depravities; he subjected the Aspasia girl—who had but a single name, Flavia—to degradations of which Janis never previously conceived. He didn’t stab Flavia to death at the moment of his last climax of the night, but later he suggested to Janis that the girl would have received the knife with a smile if he had wished to go that far and pay the charge required to dispose of her remains and install another girl in her quarters.
The revolution must be won, and Janis is determined to be one of those at the apex of this techno utopia, for otherwise there is no refuge for her in this world, no safety, no surcease from fear.
The freckle-faced bitch stands beside her, not immediately responsive to Janis’s introduction.
With the hand that is behind the girl, Janis twists Laurie’s belt, pinching her waist as a reminder that the little whore’s position is precarious.
She repeats, “Laurie Longrin wants to apologize. She called you out here because she misunderstood the situation.”
The deceitful slut clears her throat, smiles, and waves at the crowd, which Janis thinks is a clever touch, a convincing gesture.
“This nice lady,” says Laurie Longrin, raising her voice to compete with the chopper but letting no quiver of fear taint her words, “this nice lady would like you to leave, and if you leave, she’ll kill me.”
The stupid bitch has no common sense, no survival instinct. With her last three words, she tries to pull away, but she can’t wrench free of her captor’s grip.
Janis draws the pistol, jams the muzzle against the girl’s temple.
The crowd reacts and some of them start forward.
“Her death’s on you!” Janis shouts. “One more step, and I’ll blow her brains out. I chambered a round before I came out here, I’ve got some pull on the trigger, it’s a hair away from discharge, her brains’ll be all over your stupid faces.”
What now, what now? No refuge, no safety, no surcease from fear. Rejection, submission, enslavement, endless degradation. No pleasure left except to kill the hateful little shit.
24
CHRIS AND SALLY AND THE six from Austin ease back from their confrontational stance, separating themselves from the mob as well as from Janis Dern. Too many guns, too much emotion. No way this can end in a truce. Every action that Chris and his crew take from now on must be calculated to reduce the number of casualties on their side.
This is not his familiar partner, not the Janis with whom he’s worked for more than two years. There has been a dangerous fault line in her, some San Andreas of the mind, waiting for the right kind of stress to quake her. You think that you know a colleague’s mind and heart, know her far better than your sister, but maybe no one ever really knows the truth of anyone.
The helicopter’s searchlight evidently can be powered higher with the twist of a switch, because abruptly the beam doubles in brightness as it narrows in diameter, leaving a portion of the veranda in soft shadow even as it focuses on Janis and Laurie with such blazing intensity that it seems capable of setting them aflame, and the moths adance within it flicker like sparks rising from some infernal fire under the earth.
The girl shields her eyes with one hand, and Janis shouts at the chopper pilot, who of course can’t hear her.
The young Austin agent beside Chris says, “The crazy bastard wants to save her, but he’ll get her killed instead.”
It’s one of those occasions when Death plays games with the living, just to impress upon them that no one is immune from the touch of his fleshless fingers, not even freckled little girls.
Infuriated, driven by emotion rather than reason, with a one-hand grip, Janis takes an unlikely distance shot at the chopper.
The double crack of two guns echo together through the night, which is when Chris Roberts realizes the copilot at the open door must also be a well-trained sniper, perhaps former military.
No one is immune, not even freckled little girls—or those who would kill them.
Before Janis can bring the muzzle of the pistol back to the hostage’s head, she receives a bullet of her own, a round of such high caliber and velocity that her skull comes apart like a hollow pumpkin in which Halloween pranksters have put a few cherry bombs, swatches of her hair in flight like strange wet birds borne out of some grim dream. Janis collapses as she’s flung backward, and the screaming girl bolts down the steps into the yard, flailing her hands in her hair as if to chase off a swarm of bees, screaming to her knees, and thereafter sobbing.
25
AT 4:10 A.M., IN THE bedroom of his suite in the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Egon Gottfrey is awakened by the ringtone of his smartphone. The script requires him to be at once alert, and he sits up in bed, wide awake after less than four hours of sleep.
From
his immediate Arcadian superior, he receives a report of the events at Longrin Stables: Janis Dern dead following a psychotic episode; a tense standoff that could have led to additional deaths but did not; a negotiated exit by all the agents involved, whereby they do not acknowledge wrongdoing of any kind; an agreement by the mob of vigilantes not to question the validity of the agents’ FBI credentials as long as they depart at once and permanently; an understanding that there will be no prosecution of the sniper or vengeance of any kind against him; and adequate steps being taken by private-sector Arcadians to prevent Internet distribution of any vigilante account of these events or photographs of the agents involved.
Considering the Unknown Playwright’s usual style and narrative tendencies, this is surely not the way he intended this scene to be performed. Consequently, based on past experience, Gottfrey assumes that characters who were supposed to be administrators of pain will find themselves recipients of it, so that they might learn to intuit the intentions of the author more accurately.
Evidently, the Playwright has given up entirely on the learning ability of the Janis Dern character.
However, Gottfrey finds it difficult to believe that he himself will be blamed and made to suffer for this deviation from the script when he wasn’t even present for the action. He has been harried from Worstead to Killeen to Houston and has neither failed to follow the leads given him nor complained about the demands that the story has put upon him. Go with the flow. Nothing is real, anyway.
Subsequent to the report of the debacle at Longrin Stables, the caller reveals that agents have been following up on the many buses that departed the Houston terminal during the period when Ancel and Clare Hawk might have been stowaways, and that one of them has struck pay dirt. There is video of the fugitives disembarking from a bus that departed Houston at 3:30 P.M. the previous day and arrived in Beaumont less than two hours later, at 5:02. An Uber driver in Beaumont has additional information that will assist in the search.